Development & Change - 42(1) 2011 pp 1-21

Focus

The MDG Story: Intention Denied

Jan Vandemoortele

ABSTRACT

This article gives an insider’s view of the origin of the MillenniumDevelopment Goals (MDGs), the aim of which was two-fold: to rescuethe Millennium Declaration from oblivion and to expand the developmentnarrative beyond economic growth. The former has been successful, but notthe latter. Since its establishment, the MDG agenda has been permeated withthe idolatry of literalism and sanitized to fit the conventional developmentparadigm. Statistics have been abused to fabricate evidence of success. Thegreat paradox is that poverty is increasingly regarded as a multi-dimensionalphenomenon whilst its quantification remains essentially one-dimensional,which reinforces a money-metric perspective of the MDGs. The agendahas been cut back to a standard set of macroeconomic, sectoral orinstitutional reforms of a technical nature. However, the MDG agendaimplies fundamental transformations in society, which are invariably drivenby domestic politics and local actors. The world is off track, not becauseof insufficient economic growth but mostly because people in the bottomquintiles have benefited disproportionately little from national progress. Aslong as the world continues to turn a blind eye to the growing inequitieswithin countries, the MDGs will be mission impossible. For the remainingperiod, their meaning is best described as ‘Minding Development Gaps’.

INTRODUCTION

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have been misinterpreted asone-size-fits-all targets and misused to reinforce a donor-centric view ofdevelopment. Most importantly, however, they have been misappropriatedto propagate an economistic perspective of development. As a consequence,they have failed in their attempt to shift the focus of the developmentdiscourse from income-poverty to the multi-dimensional nature of humanpoverty; from a narrow growth paradigm to a broader human-centred per-spective of sustainable and equitable well-being. The money-metric viewhas succeeded in misappropriating the MDGs to reproduce the conventionalnarrative of development. This article gives an account of the MDG story,

The author is a former UN staff member and co-architect of the MDGs. At present he is anindependent researcher, writer and lecturer.

Development and Change 00(0): 1–21. C© 2011 International Institute of Social Studies.Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and350 Main St., Malden, MA 02148, USA

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from the intention to foster evidence-based priority setting at the nationallevel to the actual outcome of policy-based evidence making at the globallevel.

The conventional view regards slow economic growth as the main rea-son why so many countries will miss the 2015 targets. Economic growth isconsidered to be the primary driver in reducing poverty. Others argue thatit is insufficient foreign aid or inadequate governance that prevents so manycountries from achieving the MDGs. In other words, human developmentis considered either as growth-mediated, aid-mediated or as governance-mediated. Several institutions and individuals subscribe to one of theseviews. Dollar and Kraay (2000) exemplify the growth argument; Sachs(2005) embodies the aid argument; and Kaufmann et al. (2009) advance thegovernance argument. Each is absolutely convinced of the power of theirexplanatory factor, as well as the direction of causality. They reduce the de-velopment narrative to an argument either about faster growth, more aid orbetter governance. To substantiate their simplistic arguments they use, andsometimes misuse, statistics — validating Saith’s (2006: 1174) observationthat ‘institutionalizing targets in bureaucracies and governmental regimesusually invites misuse and manipulation of statistics and the misrepresenta-tion of outcomes’.

The three arguments have one thing in common; they all interpret theMDG agenda in a manner that fits the donor-centric perspective of devel-opment. ‘We know what works’ is the common refrain. Reports with titlessuch as What will it Take to Achieve the Millennium Development Goals?(UNDP, 2010) exemplify this attitude. Donor agencies and multilateral in-stitutions often display a strong belief in global blueprints, silver bulletsand universal trajectories. They firmly believe in best practices that can bereplicated and scaled up. The growth argument contends that in order toachieve the MDGs it would be essential to liberalize and deregulate theeconomy and to reduce trade barriers. Or, according to the aid argument, itwould suffice to scale up investments in health, education, agriculture, wa-ter and sanitation, and infrastructure for each and every country to achievethe global targets. Or, it is essential to foster good governance throughmulti-party elections and anti-corruption campaigns, claims the governanceargument.

They all reduce the MDG agenda to the application of a standard set ofmacroeconomic, sectoral or institutional reforms of a technical nature. Theymiss the point, however, that achieving the MDGs requires fundamentaltransformations in society, which transcend macroeconomic, sectoral andinstitutional models. Moving towards gender equality or improving maternalhealth, for instance, will take more than applying a few technical solutionsor replicating lessons learnt elsewhere. Such transformations are never easy.The pursuit and realization of such fundamental societal change is invariablydriven by domestic politics and by local actors. They are seldom triggeredby outsiders or caused by technical advice, let alone by loans and grantsfrom overseas.

The MDG Story: Intention Denied 3

In the 1980s and 1990s, the Bretton Woods institutions attempted to bringabout transformations in economic policy through conditionalities attachedto structural adjustment programmes. That experience confirms that outsideleverage is rather limited when the policy space is severely constrained.1

To be successful, transformations must be driven by an internal impulse forchange. Those who readily provide general solutions to specific problems,or those who constantly repeat standard recommendations for achieving theMDGs, frequently fail to understand that the end of human poverty will notresult from more wealth or aid, but from more equity and justice. Behindeach preventable case of child or maternal mortality lies a story of inequityand discrimination.

It should not come as a surprise that each of the single-minded schoolsof thought about growth, aid and governance has provoked strong and solidcounter-arguments. Perlo-Freeman and Webber (2009), for instance, arguethat the empirical evidence does not support the view that economic growthplays such an essential role in improving nutrition, education or health; ratherthe causality seems stronger the other way around. Recent publications withtitles such as ‘The Trouble with Aid’ (Glennie, 2008), ‘The Curse of Aid’(Djankov et al., 2008) and ‘The Aid Trap’ (Hubbard and Duggan, 2009)caution against the simplistic aid argument. In the area of governance, theInstitute of Development Studies recommends turning ‘the picture upsidedown so as to challenge the whole raft of preconditions and often implicitassumptions that underpin current development practice’ (2010: 70). Szirmaisummarizes it well when he writes ‘every single mono-causal explanationever advanced for development falls down in the face of the empiricalevidence’ (2008: 7).

This article describes how the MDGs came into being. It explains thattheir main purpose was two-fold: to rescue from oblivion some of the maincommitments made in the Millennium Declaration, and to broaden the de-velopment discourse beyond the narrow focus on economic growth. Giventheir success regarding the former, several actors have tried to catch a freeride on the MDG bandwagon. Regarding the latter aim, however, the MDGshave been considerably less successful. The article argues that the MDGswill not be achieved as long as the world continues to turn a blind eye tothe growing disparities within countries. Growth, aid and governance allplay a role; yet in and of themselves they will never get the world back ontrack towards the global targets.2 The principal reason why the world is off

1. Chang (2007: 35) speaks of the World Bank’s and the IMF’s ‘Henry Ford approach todiversity’, referring to Ford’s promise that customers could have a car painted ‘any colourso long as it’s black’.

2. Milo Vandemoortele (2010) shows that inequity actually undermines growth because highinequality depresses aggregate demand, stimulates conspicuous consumption that generatesfew domestic jobs, contributes to financial instability and entrenches special interests thatdelay policy reforms and impede counter-cyclical measures. Similar points are highlightedin Levine et al. (2010).

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track is because the poor and the dispossessed have not benefited much, if atall, from the social progress and economic growth the majority of countrieshave experienced. To change this course, the discourse about the MDGs hasto change. In the meantime, the actual meaning of the MDGs can be bestdescribed as ‘Minding Development Gaps’.

INSIDE STORY

Each global conference or world summit produces a declaration which cap-tures the public’s attention for a while but quickly recedes into oblivion. Thisoccurred again in September 2000 when the Millennium Summit issued theMillennium Declaration (UN, 2000). For several months, the document wasquoted in countless speeches, reports and articles. But after a while, theattention started to fade. It was then that the idea arose to place selectedtargets contained in the Millennium Declaration into a free-standing cate-gory in order to rescue them from oblivion. They came to be known as theMillennium Development Goals.

The Millennium Declaration was essentially crafted by John Ruggie —then Special Adviser to UN Secretary-General Koffi Annan. Soon after theSummit, Ruggie returned to academia and was replaced by Michael Doyle. Inearly 2001, Michael and I discussed the options for rescuing the documentfrom oblivion.3 We agreed to establish and co-chair a group of expertsfrom across the United Nations, including the World Bank and the IMF, aswell as from the Development Assistance Committee of the Organizationof Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD/DAC). Its job wasto extract the key targets from the Declaration and translate these into afree-standing category. Since the group included people from all major UNagencies, departments, funds and programmes, it took about six months toput the MDGs together.

The targets were taken verbatim from the Millennium Declaration, whichwas agreed language among member states. As UN staff, we were fullyaware that we did not have the authority to change an iota of that text. A lotof ink has been spilt as to why those eighteen targets were selected and notothers. The answer is straightforward: in an age where numbers prevail, itwas decided that only those targets with agreed indicators and with robustdata were to be included — but not without making some exceptions. This iswhy the quality of education, the affordability of water, good governance andhuman rights (i.e. civil and political rights) and several other areas coveredin the Millennium Declaration were not included in the MDGs.

Apart from selecting the eighteen targets, the group of UN experts struc-tured them into eight major goals and selected the relevant indicator(s)for each target — forty-eight in total. The group also needed to clarify the

3. The author had recently been seconded by UNICEF to lead the newly-established PovertyGroup at UNDP.


period over which the targets were to be met. The Declaration is vague aboutthe period over which the targets have to be achieved. One of the recurringfeatures in global target setting is that developed countries — the so-called‘B-group’ in UN-jargon — usually set ambitious targets, whereas developingcountries — known as the ‘G-77’ — aim for a sense of realism. At the Mil-lennium Summit, the two groups could not agree on the level of ambition.To create the semblance of consensus, despite some deep divisions, the dif-ference was swept under the carpet. Member states agreed on a set of globaltargets but they blurred the period over which these reductions were to berealized. They called, for instance, for the halving of poverty and hungerby 2015. Although this may have sounded fine, it does not specify the timeframe. And it worked; few observers ever noticed that the Millennium Dec-laration left considerable room for interpretation as to the level of ambitionof the global targets.

It was left to the group of UN experts to set the baseline year. Thechoice quickly fell on 1990, for two reasons. First, it proved unrealisticto reduce hunger, poverty and the proportion of people without access tosafe drinking water by half, infant and child mortality by two-thirds, andmaternal mortality by three-quarters between 2000 and 2015. It was obviousthat more time would be needed to achieve such ambitious targets. Thesecond reason was that most global targets contained in the MillenniumDeclaration had their origin in the 1990s at the various world summits andinternational conferences. Most of them used 1990 as the baseline year.Given the Declaration’s fuzziness about the timeframe, 1990 was takenas the baseline year for most global targets.4 The MDG period was thusset between 1990 and 2015, covering twenty-five years, a period usuallyassociated with one generation.

Having selected the targets, grouped them in eight goals, agreed on theforty-eight indicators and clarified the period, the group moved on to thefinal stage of giving the new set a name. One might think that MillenniumDevelopment Goals would have been the obvious choice. Not so. It actuallyrequired intense and protracted discussions before the name was agreed upon.Some members of the group wanted to make it obvious that the new set oftargets was related to the International Development Goals (OECD, 1996).That set was put together by the Ministers of Development Co-operationin donor countries in an effort to stem the decline in aid levels at the time.Except for poverty, the targets echoed the ones agreed at the world summitsand international conferences of the 1990s.5

4. The Millennium Declaration refers to the baseline year only for the targets on maternal andchild mortality. Moreover, the reference is indirect — i.e. ‘of their current rates’, whichimplies the year 2000 without saying so explicitly. The other targets are totally silent aboutthe baseline year. The Declaration never refers to 1990.

5. Following the failure of the B-group to get international agreement for a poverty target atthe 1995 social summit in Copenhagen, the OECD/DAC issued its own set of goals in 1996.The Millennium Declaration provided the first UN endorsement of the poverty target.

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The major weakness of the OECD/DAC set of goals was that it omittedspecific targets for developed countries. All seven goals were to be achievedby developing countries; not a single target was set for rich countries. Nowonder they never gained much traction beyond donor countries. Neverthe-less, colleagues from OECD/DAC, the World Bank and the IMF insisted onlinking the name of the newborn to what they perceived as its pedigree. Aschairman of that final session, I was fully aware that any reference to theOECD set would mean the death knell for the new set at the UN. A clearseparation between the two was absolutely necessary if the new set was togain any political acceptance and resonance among the G-77.

Once the title was agreed, the remaining step was to release the MDGsinto the UN system. At the time, the ‘Road Map’ was being finalized — areport of the Secretary-General to the General Assembly on how to monitorthe implementation of the Millennium Declaration (UN, 2001). The list ofeight goals, eighteen targets and forty-eight indicators was annexed to thatreport and submitted to the General Assembly. In the relevant resolution,the ‘Assembly noted with appreciation the road map report’ (A/56/L.61).Although no explicit mention was made of the MDGs, they got an implicitblessing from the UN member states. The US administration at the time tookthe view that the General Assembly never formally endorsed the MDGs;thereby questioning their legitimacy and authority. But since the targetswere lifted verbatim from the Millennium Declaration, we argued that formalendorsement was redundant because member states had already agreed uponthem earlier.

As a final footnote to the story of how the MDGs came into being, itmust be added that we were initially reprimanded by the office of the UNSecretary-General for taking the initiative. This was because we had in-volved colleagues from the OECD/DAC in a UN group, and because we haddrawn the office of the Secretary-General too much into matters related todevelopment. The first reaction was not unrelated to a somewhat traumaticexperience in 2000 when the Secretary-General was severely criticized bycivil society organizations for having co-signed a report with the Secretary-General of the OECD, the Managing Director of the IMF and the Presidentof the World Bank. The document in question was entitled A Better World forAll (UN et al., 2000); it reviewed progress towards the International Devel-opment Goals. Civil society organizations dubbed it, with some justification,Bretton Woods for All. The second reason was related to the conventionalview that the Secretary-General is supposed to deal with overall diplomacyand issues of world peace, whilst development is the business of the special-ized agencies, funds and programmes. It did not take long, however, beforethe first references to the MDGs started to appear in speeches and reports bythe Secretary-General.

Several observers have written different versions of the MDG story.Manning (2009), for instance, recounts the origin of the MDGs from thepoint of view of OECD/DAC. Another version claims, incorrectly, that ‘the


reproductive health goal disappeared during the negotiations to finalize theMDGs’ (Hulme, 2010: 20), when in fact the Millennium Declaration nevermentions reproductive health. Hulme also alleges that the negotiations weretense and quarrelsome, when in reality there was a reasonable entente amongthe UN staff and those of the World Bank, IMF and OECD.

SANITIZING THE MDGs

The impact of global targets such as the MDGs cannot be measuredwith any degree of precision or certainty. The counterfactual scenario ismissing — i.e. what would have happened without them. A contribution canreadily be measured but an attribution is more difficult to make. Neverthe-less, it can be argued that the impact of the MDGs has been positive. It hasmostly been in terms of mobilizing stakeholders and informing the publicabout human development, broadly defined. Many acronyms see the light ofday but not all stay around. The MDGs have been an exception.

Their power stems from a combination of three factors: (i) the charm ofsimplicity; (ii) their integrated and synergetic nature; and (iii) their mea-surability. They express key outcomes for human well-being in health, ed-ucation, nutrition, water and sanitation, and gender equality. By focusingon outcomes, they are intuitively easy to understand. Sectoral specialistsand development practitioners, however, tend to focus on the complexity ofhuman development. Much of the critique against the MDGs stems from amisunderstanding about their ultimate purpose and their primary users.

The fundamental purpose of the MDGs is not for each and every countryto meet the global targets, which would be utopian.6 Their ultimate aimis to help align national priorities with the MDG agenda so as to fosterhuman well-being. Therefore, the intended users are primarily politicians,parliamentarians, preachers, teachers and journalists. It cannot be empha-sized enough that development practitioners and policy makers do not needthe MDGs to carry out their work. The MDGs have little to do with definingthe nuts and bolts of macroeconomic or sectoral policies or with designingtechnical interventions. Development practitioners already have the nec-essary instruments and tools at their disposal, namely policy frameworks,econometric models, human rights conventions, sectoral lessons and goodpractice, development concepts, narratives and paradigms. Their applicationdoes not require the MDGs.

However, the MDG agenda has been infused with a dual idolatry; thatof literalism and that of ideology. Regarding literalism, it is common forthe representatives of the different perspectives to complain that their

6. A lot is usually made of the countries that will miss the MDGs. The discussion oftenoverlooks that if all countries were to meet them, the world would exceed the MDGs;which is not what the Millennium Declaration calls for. The misinterpretation of the MDGsas one-size-fits-all targets is discussed in Vandemoortele (2009).

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focus — e.g. infrastructure, governance, human rights, etc. — is not ex-plicitly mentioned in the MDGs. Their implicit view is that the MDGs arean exhaustive list of all the things necessary for achieving human develop-ment. They usually refer to the concept of ‘MDG-plus’ meaning that theirspecific concerns should be added to the MDGs. This, however, would beself-defeating. If all aspects of development were to be included, the MDGswould become overloaded and incomprehensible to their primary users.While the literalists believe in the perfectibility of the MDGs, the reality isthat their success is due to their conciseness and measurability. This grouprefuses to accept that the MDGs can be used to make the case for their par-ticular topic even if it is not mentioned specifically. In fact, one can easilyuse the MDGs to make the case for infrastructure, for instance, because ev-eryone understands that schools and hospitals, roads and bridges are neededto achieve the MDGs. It would serve the MDGs well if those whose pointof view is not explicitly mentioned would cease to call for an ever longer,‘MDG plus’ list of targets, and focus instead on finding imaginative andcreative ways of using the concise list for their cause. The MDGs have to betaken seriously but not necessarily literally.

Regarding ideology, the most common criticism is that the MDGs specifyoutcomes without spelling out the process of achieving them. In this way,many have not only tried to misappropriate the global targets to gain supportfor their own development paradigm, they have also sanitized them bymaking the MDGs less offensive and more acceptable for the conventionalview of development. The fact of the matter is that the MDGs were nevermeant to promote a certain development strategy. They focus on ends, noton means, on the destination and not on the journey. This distinction isimportant because all development is context-specific. Any generalizationabout prescribed trajectories and ways and means towards specific outcomesis unhelpful and often erroneous. It is in this regard that the MDGs must beseen as ‘good servants but bad masters’ (Manning, 2009: 6).

By looking for dimensions that were never intended in their originaldesign, some of the criticism has been unnecessarily fierce. The MDGs havebeen described as ‘a bunch of words’ (Langford, 2010: 89). The formula‘neo-liberal globalization + MDGs = development’ (Saith, 2007: 13) mayreflect the prevailing paradigm but it would be incorrect to blame the MDGsfor this state of affairs. The misappropriation of the MDGs as a Trojan horsefor a particular development narrative cannot be held against the MDGs.Anything that gets some international traction risks being misappropriated.One may regret this but it is to be expected. The primary purpose of the MDGswas precisely to make the dominant narrative a bit more sophisticated byfocusing on equitable and sustainable human well-being, beyond the narrowdomain of economic growth. The reason why the MDGs have failed in thisrespect is not due to their design. Although it can be improved, there isnothing inherent in the design of the MDGs that has triggered this course ofevents.


The process of sanitizing the MDGs started with the re-definition of humandeprivation in money-metric terms. The world summits of the 1990s focusedon specific aspects of human well-being, such as literacy and nutrition,health and reproductive health, gender equality and access to safe water.Donor countries wanted to introduce a global target for poverty at the 1995social summit in Copenhagen but developing countries objected becausethey found the concept ill-defined. A year later, donor countries issued theInternational Development Goals (OECD/DAC, 1996) which included thetarget of halving poverty by 2015. In 2000, that target was included inthe Millennium Declaration but with an important amendment: it explicitlydefined poverty as living on less than a dollar per day. This is unique becausethe Declaration does not specify the indicator for any other target. This odditydoes not originate in statistics but in politics. During the negotiations, donorcountries worked hard to embed the international poverty norm into theformulation of the target. The word ‘poverty’ is actually not mentioned inthe Declaration, which reads: ‘To halve, by the year 2015, the proportion ofthe world’s people whose income is less than one dollar a day’ (paragraph19).7 And so a new global target was born.

That target was convenient because it helped to sanitize the MDGs ina manner which allowed the conventional perspective of development tousurp them. Poverty reduction, defined in money-metric terms, was madeinto the central target. Through some tautological statistics, the $1/day normdirectly bolstered the view that economic growth is crucial for achievingthe MDGs. While the promotion of the international poverty norm of $1/daywas a key instrument in this effort, it has been the readiness of key actors andinstitutions to accept and use this particular indicator that has been crucialin sanitizing the MDGs. Bilateral donors, multilateral organizations, leadingthink tanks, top-rated universities and major media outlets have relentlesslyrepeated the assertion that hundreds of millions of people have been lifted outof poverty. Given that the evidence for making that assertion is disputableand highly disputed, it would be more accurate to say that, at best, the averageincome of the poor struggled to creep above the poverty line. The readinessto take the poverty estimates of the World Bank at face value is not due to alack of statistical literacy; it clearly serves a non-statistical purpose.

The aim of repeating the assertion that millions of people have been liftedout of poverty is to ensure that the MDG agenda does not upset the prevailingdevelopment paradigm and does not undercut a money-metric and donor-centric view of development. The efforts have been quite successful, for thedebate is still narrowly focused on economic growth and income-poverty.This is perhaps the greatest paradox of our times. Most observers and policymakers readily agree that poverty must be seen as multi-dimensional, yet

7. The formulation of the original target was ‘a reduction by one-half in the proportion ofpeople living in extreme poverty by 2015’ (OECD, 1996: 2). No mention was made of thepoverty norm of $1 per day.

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its quantification reinforces a one-dimensional interpretation — i.e. money-metric. It is not the MDGs that posit income-poverty as the cornerstone ofhuman development, human well-being or human rights. Quite the contrary:it has been the inability and/or the unwillingness on the part of the majoractors and players to abandon old theories and mindsets according to whichrapid growth and a particular development paradigm represent the sole routeto achieving the global targets. John Maynard Keynes puts it famously:‘Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from intellectualinfluences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist’ (1936: 383).Two Nobel Laureates in Economics suggest that little has changed in thisregard. In the wake of the financial crisis, Joseph Stiglitz opines, ‘a sur-prisingly large number of those who had previously believed that marketswork perfectly, and are self-correcting still believe that’.8 Paul Krugmanwrites, ‘When I was young and naıve, I believed that important people tookpositions based on careful consideration of the options. Now I know better.Much of what Serious People believe rests on prejudices, not analysis’.9

The global poverty estimates have not fostered a deeper and better un-derstanding of human poverty; they have merely reinforced the growthnarrative, that poverty will automatically be reduced due to the trickle-downeffect. They have hijacked the debate in the past, enabling key players to staywithin their disciplinary comfort zone and reaffirm their particular world-view. A recent World Bank study on the impact of the financial crisis onpoverty in developing countries illustrates how conclusions about povertyare drawn from abstractions and not from concrete observations of reality.The following quote is telling:

In Bangladesh and the Philippines, the crisis has led to a slowdown in GDP growth, whichis expected to raise the poverty rate in 2010 by 1.2 and 1.5 percentage points, respectively,compared with what would have occurred without the crisis. In Mexico, GDP actuallycontracted by nearly 7 percent in 2009, and it is projected to rise by only 3 percent in 2010.The cumulative impact is projected to raise the poverty rate by nearly 4 percentage points inMexico between 2008 and 2010. (Habib et al., 2010: 1)

These assertions about poverty trends in the three countries are made with-out any shred of evidence obtained from direct observations. They are basedon assumptions, not on facts. They start from projected growth rates for theentire economy and subsequently estimate the resulting impact on householdincome, using the international poverty line. To claim that macroeconomicestimates reflect specific changes in well-being at the micro-level is auda-cious, for it reflects over-abstractions and over-simplifications. In spite ofthe veneer of accuracy expressed by an unwarranted use of decimal points,most observers consider this kind of analysis to be questionable science.

8. Interview with Stiglitz by the Huffington Post in January 2010. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/20/joseph-stiglitz-interview_n_429437.html (accessed June 2010).

9. ‘Myths of Austerity’ Column in The New York Times, 1 July 2010.


Several observers have argued that the MDGs should include a targetfor economic growth. Indeed, this example of the ‘MDG plus’ approachis not new. A poor precedent was set in 2007 when two new targets wereadded — on employment and on reproductive health. The former calls forthe achievement of full and productive employment and decent work for all.The year by which the target is to be achieved remains unclear. Neither is itclear what ‘decent work’ really means. The concept is ill-defined, difficultto understand and impossible to measure. The four indicators selected toassess progress towards this particular target are all quite problematic.10

Either their reliability is undermined by severe methodological weaknessesor they have no direct relevance to the desired outcome. None of themstands up to serious examination. This is not to suggest that employmentis unimportant but merely that the manner in which the target has beenformulated leaves much to be desired. It has been found that targets thatgenerate the greatest impact are those that are clearly defined and strike abalance between their level of ambition and their sense of realism. ‘Decentwork’ is vague and ‘full employment’ is an aspirational goal that cannot beachieved. Hence, this particular target sets up all countries for failure, whichsaps the motivation of actors and undermines the credibility of global targetsetting itself.

Such a poorly formulated target merely serves the agenda of a particularinstitution — in this case the International Labour Organization. Indeed,the influence exercised by multilateral institutions over the shape and con-tent of global goals and targets should not be underestimated. The ‘pettysovereignty’ (Duffield, 2007) exercised by such organizations is real, albeitoften overlooked.11 The employment target, as formulated, does little tostrengthen the set of global targets because it lacks clarity, conciseness andmeasurability. If the reformulation of the MDGs for the post-2015 periodfollows that pattern, the end result is likely to look like a badly decoratedChristmas tree.

STATISTICS ON STEROIDS

A common critique is that the MDGs were put together by a group ofstatistical puritans, driven more by accuracy than by relevance. Our re-sponse is that measurability is important, not for statistical but for political

10. They include (i) growth rate of GDP per person employed; (ii) employment-to-populationratio; (iii) proportion of employed people living below $1 (PPP) per day; and (iv) proportionof own-account and contributing family workers in total employment.

11. Another example of petty sovereignty relates to the hunger target. The Food and AgriculturalOrganization and the World Food Programme continue to emphasize the target set by the1996 World Food Summit, which calls for the reduction in the number of undernourishedpeople by half to no more than 420 million by 2015. It is considerably more ambitious thanthe MDG target of halving the proportion of people who suffer from hunger between 1990and 2015.


reasons. Measurement influences public action and shapes the political de-bate. League tables have triggered heated discussions, stirred action andeventually resulted in policy reforms and public action. The first thing peo-ple do when they get hold of the Human Development Report, for instance,is not to read the executive summary on the particular topic of the year.Most look first at the HDI league table and compare the position of theircountry to previous years and other countries. Similarly, the power of globaltargets stems, at least in part, from their numerical nature. Without reliablestatistics, global targets lose much of their power and appeal.

Therefore, it is unwise to try to count something when it cannot be countedaccurately. A target that is ill-specified cannot be monitored reliably, irre-spective of the statistical effort one undertakes. A concrete example is the2020 MDG target to achieve a significant improvement in the lives of atleast 100 million slum dwellers. Not only is ‘significant improvement’ ill-specified; there is no generally accepted definition of a ‘slum dweller’.Hence, this particular target cannot be monitored with any degree of accu-racy, simply because its very content is undefined. Its inclusion in the MDGswas one of the exceptions to the general rule of selecting targets from theMillennium Declaration — another example of ‘petty sovereignty’ exercisedby multilateral bodies.

Another example concerns a more prominent target, namely that onpoverty. The number of people who live in poverty cannot be monitoredwith any degree of certainty because poverty is ill-defined. Its multiple di-mensions make a universally accepted definition virtually impossible. Toa certain extent, poverty is in the eye of the beholder. A family whose in-come falls below the poverty line is usually considered poor. It is less clearhow to handle unmet basic needs. Should a family with an income abovethe poverty line be considered as non-poor when the children are unable toattend primary school, or when its members have no have access to primaryhealth care or to safe drinking water? The answer will depend on the inter-pretation of poverty. According to a money-metric view, the family wouldnot be ranked as poor. A broader interpretation would consider the family asimpoverished. Others interpret poverty as the inability to keep up with theoverall standard of living prevalent in the community. Still others emphasizenon-material aspects such as voicelessness and powerlessness that preventpeople from participating as fully-fledged members in society.

The point is that poverty is not easy to measure. Contrary to popularbelief, it is actually quite hard to quantify poverty. It was for this reasonthat several members of the UN experts group had serious misgivings aboutincluding the $1/day target in the MDGs. Their hesitation was not unjus-tified. Recently, the World Bank — the sole producer of global povertyestimates — signalled that it had systematically undercounted the number ofpeople living in poverty (Chen and Ravallion, 2008). The reported marginof error was not minor; it approached the 50 per cent level. Normally, whenan estimate is off the mark by such a large margin, it casts serious doubt


on its credibility. This has not been the case with global poverty estimates.Institutions and individuals have immediately used the revised estimates asif the adjustments were a minor fine-tuning — certainly not an increase bymore than 400 million poor people. A remark attributed to Benjamin Dis-raeli comes to mind — there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, andstatistics. The story does not end there.

Another assertion, made to the point of monotony, is that African countrieswill not achieve the poverty target. The consensus is that ‘Sub-Saharan Africacounted 100 million more extremely poor people in 2005 than in 1990 andthe poverty rate remained above 50 per cent’ (UN, 2009: 7). However, a verydifferent assertion has been made by two analysts at top-rated universities inthe USA. Sala-i-Martin and Pinkovskiy state, ‘if present trends continue [insub-Saharan Africa], the poverty Millennium Development Goal of halvingthe proportion of people with incomes less than one dollar a day will beachieved on time’ (2010: 1). Which one is to be believed? The answer is nei-ther. Both assertions are based on ‘statistics on steroids’. They are not basedon any objective observation of reality. Both use fuzzy statistics to make theworld fit a particular worldview. Hard data are missing because poverty isill-defined and the indicator is highly problematic. They place considerablereliance on modelling, not on observations. The poverty target illustrateshow targets that are poorly defined lead to unintended consequences. Theylead to abuse, frequently to defend an ideological position under the guise ofrigorous statistical work. The controversy regarding poverty trends in Africaexemplifies the danger that vaguely defined targets can lead to policy-basedevidence making, instead of evidence-based policy making.

Another example of statistics on steroids is the maternal mortality rate.Until recently, the accepted view was that ‘there has been little progressin reducing maternal deaths’ in the world (UN, 2010a: paragraph 30). Yetthis view has been challenged. A recent article argues that the world hasseen considerably faster reductions in maternal mortality than previouslythought. Based on data for 181 countries, Hogan et al. conclude, ‘Substantial,albeit varied, progress has been made towards MDG5’ (2010: 1). An earlierarticle estimated the number of maternal deaths at 535,900 cases globallyfor 2005 (Hill et al., 2007). The Hogan estimate, however, puts that numberconsiderably lower, at 342,900 for 2008. Both estimates use, for the mostpart, the same sources of information.12 The debate has been intense. Oneexpert has framed her comments thus: ‘Are my made up numbers better thanyour made up numbers?’.13 Which estimate can we trust?

12. In another article in The Lancet, Rajaratnam et al. (2010) make a similar optimistic claimregarding child mortality. They estimate that the annual number of global under-five deathsdecreased by 4 million between 1990 and 2008. UNICEF estimates the decrease at about3 million. The optimistic assertions about progress regarding maternal and child health areboth based on research funded by the Gates Foundation.

13. Blog by Karen Grepin, April 2010: http://karengrepin.blogspot.com/2010/04/are-my-made-up-numbers-better-than-your.html (accessed June 2010).


The fact is that both estimates are based on a problematic indicator. TheUN states that ‘Measuring maternal mortality is challenging at best’ (2009:27). The diagnostic of a maternal death is not always clear cut. It has beenobserved, for instance, that maternal mortality increases during the rainyseason when malaria is more prevalent (Cross et al., 2010). Measuringmaternal mortality is fraught with difficulties and uncertainties. Most expertsprefer to use the related process-indicator, namely the proportion of birthsattended by skilled health personnel. In short, it is unwise to base an argumentabout maternal health on the maternal mortality rate.

Hunger offers another example to show that all indicators are imperfectbut that some are more imperfect than others. Two indicators exist to mon-itor hunger: underweight and undernourishment. WHO/UNICEF estimateunderweight among children below five years of age; FAO estimates thepopulation below a minimum level of dietary energy consumption. The ac-curacy of underweight depends on the proper measurement of the age andweight of the child. Data generally stem from national nutrition surveys,Demographic and Health Surveys, and Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys,whose quality has improved over time. Undernourishment, on the otherhand, requires information on the average amount of food available at thecountry level, the inequality within the country in terms of access to food,and the minimum amount of food required per person.

Not surprisingly, the two estimates yield different results. Data on un-derweight suggest that hunger in the world is declining gradually, whereasthe statistics on undernourishment indicate exactly the opposite. The lattershows that the number of people who suffer from hunger increased from 800million in 1990 to 1.02 billion in 2009. Again, which one should we believe?All indicators use two basic ingredients: observations and transformations.It can be observed, quite directly, whether a child is malnourished, but directobservation cannot determine whether a child is struggling to survive onless than $1/day. When the indicator requires a large amount of transforma-tions, however, its reliability and accuracy will diminish because trans-formations involve assumptions. Calculating undernourishment requiresconsiderably more transformations and assumptions than estimating under-weight. Hence, the latter is the preferred indicator for monitoring the hungertarget.

In short, one needs to exercise considerable caution with arguments madeon the basis of indicators that involve a hefty dose of transformations. Alongwith undernourishment and the maternal mortality rate, the $1/day povertyhead count belongs to the group of most problematic indicators.14 Ironically,

14. The flawed nature of the $1/day poverty indicator has been exposed by many analysts,including Fischer (2010), Kanbur (2009), Reddy (2008), Reddy and Pogge (2002) andSaith (2005). A glance at any of them should seriously undermine any confidence one canplace in the global poverty estimates. The number of countries with missing data remainshigh. The World Bank states, ‘78 out of 149 developing countries lack adequate data to


it is the most frequently mentioned MDG indicator in reports, speeches andarticles in newspapers and in journals.

Under the motto ‘you measure what you treasure’, the case is often madefor setting global targets for topics with weak indicators and data, preciselyto stimulate statistical work. As long as they are kept outside the MDGs, it isargued, no serious work will be undertaken to improve their measurability.However, the above-mentioned examples on poverty, hunger and maternalmortality show that the inclusion of a vaguely defined target does not nec-essarily lead to improved monitoring. The global poverty estimates havenot improved over the past decade, despite being regarded as central to theMDG agenda. There is thus no basis for assuming that statistical monitoringwill improve once the area of concern is turned into a global target.

EQUITY

The MDGs are designed to track the equitable pattern of progress. Althoughimperfect, the relevant indicator for that purpose is the share of national con-sumption that accrues to the bottom 20 per cent of the population. However,the sanitized version of the MDGs largely ignores this; the many monitoringreports seldom report data or analyses for that indicator. Instead, they sharplyfocus on income-poverty, using the $1/day norm. As a result, the commonview is that slow growth is the principal reason why the world will miss the2015 targets. Insufficient aid and/or poor governance come a distant second.

The evidence, however, points elsewhere; namely that within-country in-equalities have turned the MDGs into ‘mission impossible’. People in thebottom quintiles have not benefited much, if at all, from social progress andeconomic growth in the majority of countries. Saith (2006: 1185) pointstowards the ‘spectacularly rising inequalities that are as visible as the wors-ening forms of social and service exclusion in large parts of the third world’.Minujin and Delamonica (2003), Moser et al. (2005) and Reidpath et al.(2009) document the growing disparities in terms of child mortality. Theworld will miss the MDG targets largely because within-country disparitieshave grown to the point of slowing down global progress.

Demographic and Health Surveys show that children born in poor familiesare more likely to suffer from malnutrition and illiteracy and die prematurelythan their counterparts born in rich families in the same country. They alsoshow that such gaps have widened in recent years in most countries. Ananalysis of countries with disaggregated data about under-five mortality(U5MR) confirms that the majority of them witnessed growing inequality.Most of the countries that have reduced their average U5MR over the pastdecade have also seen an increase in inequality among quintile-specificU5MR values. Of the countries with relevant data for the past decade, most

monitor poverty trends’ (2008: 22). One wonders how global estimates can be taken at facevalue when they cover less than half the countries in the world.


witnessed an increase in inequality.15 They divide themselves along a ratio of3:1 — for each country that managed to reduce inequality three witnessed anincrease in inequality. Each group represents a diverse variety of countries.It cannot be said, for instance, that Africa or the least developed countriesfall into a particular category.

The evidence suggests quite compellingly that relative progress matters;that well-being is not solely determined by the absolute level of humandevelopment. Already in 1996, the editors of the British Medical Jour-nal wrote, ‘what matters in determining mortality and health in a societyis less the overall wealth of that society and more how evenly wealth isdistributed’ (1996: 7037). Wilkinson and Pickett (2010) show that incomeinequality is strongly associated with shorter life expectancy, higher infantmortality, lower birth weight, more AIDS and more depression. They useevidence from twenty-three rich countries and from the fifty states in theUSA because they provide the widest coverage of reliable data on rele-vant indicators. The most unequal countries or states do worse according toalmost every quality-of-life indicator. Whether the test is life expectancy,infant mortality, obesity, homicides, learning, teenage pregnancy, illegaldrug use, depression or mental illness, the more equal the society the betterits performance. The best predictor of how countries or states rank is notthe differences in wealth between them but the differences in wealth withinthem.

Countries that perform best in terms of health and well-being includeJapan, Sweden, Norway and Finland. They also display the lowest levels ofinequality. Among those that do worst on all fronts are the USA, Portugal,the UK, New Zealand and Australia. Similarly, a recent study concludes thatsocial mobility between generations is dramatically lower in highly unequalcountries such as the USA and the UK than in less unequal countries (OECD,2010). If children want to climb higher on the socio-economic ladder thantheir parents, the study finds, they had better move to Canada, Denmark,Norway, Finland or Sweden — all countries with low or moderate levels ofinequality.

The conventional interpretation is that more income leads to better liv-ing standards. In other words, health and well-being are mostly seen asgrowth-mediated. However, Wilkinson and Pickett show that average lifeexpectancy, for instance, displays no relation to the average level of per-capita income among rich countries. Neither is health status related to theamount of health expenditure or to the availability of high-tech medical ser-vices. The biggest influence on health and well-being, they find, is the levelof inequality within the country.

15. They include Armenia, Burkina Faso, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Guinea, Haiti, Kazakhstan,Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Namibia, Nepal, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Pakistan, Peru, Philip-pines, Rwanda, Senegal and Vietnam. Those that reduced mortality and inequality includeBolivia, Cote d’Ivoire, Dominican Republic, Ghana, Indonesia, Niger and Zambia.


In other words, unequal societies are less healthy. Why? The answerusually given is that more equitable countries have fewer poor people andtherefore fewer health and social problems. Wilkinson and Pickett arguethat this is only part of the story. Evidence suggests that greater equalitynot only helps those at the bottom but also benefits those at the top. Theycompare people across rich countries with the same level of income and findthat those in more equal societies invariably do better. In unequal societies,people from all income levels — not only the poor — have worse levels ofwell-being. In other words, everyone benefits from greater equality. A highlevel of inequality leads to greater status anxiety and more chronic stress foreverybody, including those with relatively high status. Relative status hurtsand harms people physically, emotionally and mentally — all people, not justthe poor. The impact of high inequality on health and well-being thus runsacross the entire society. This is confirmed by the dramatic improvements inaverage life expectancy in Britain during the two World Wars of the twentiethcentury. Amartya Sen concludes, ‘we are really looking at influences onmortality rates that concern economic organization and social environmentrather than the average level of real income per head’ (1995:12).

Wilkinson and Pickett are less clear about the relevance of their thesis todeveloping countries. On the one hand, they state, ‘In poorer countries it isstill essential to raise living standards’ (2010: 30), implying that the ‘spiritlevel’ applies mostly to affluent and developed nations. Later, however, theyargue that ‘a number of outcomes, including health and violence, are alsorelated to inequality in less developed countries’ (ibid.: 189). It would behard to accept that the impact of inequality on well-being kicks in only abovea certain threshold of economic development. And it would be problematicto argue that the significance of relative income is negligible until a societyreaches a certain income threshold.

In summary, Wilkinson and Pickett’s main argument is that ‘There isno one policy for reducing inequality . . . and another for raising nationalstandards of performance. Reducing inequality is the best way of doing both’(ibid.: 30). This, it has to be added, applies to all countries. It cannot be arguedthat well-being is growth-mediated in poor countries, but equity-mediatedin rich countries.

CONCLUSION

The MDGs are not a sterile diversion or a reductionist view of development.Despite their limitations, the global targets have energized many stake-holders across the world. But ideology and the idolatry of literalism havedetracted from their main objective. The former has succeeded in undermin-ing the main purpose of the MDGs, which was to expand the developmentnarrative beyond the narrow growth paradigm. The promotion of the inter-national poverty line has been a key instrument for multilateral and bilateraldonors, leading think tanks, top-rated universities and major media outlets


to fit the facts to their particular worldview. Their principal storyline is thatpoverty is being reduced thanks to foreign aid and charitable projects, as wellas the application of a particular policy framework and good governance.The poverty debate has been dollarized, and the MDG discourse has beendonorized.

However, the MDGs cannot be reduced to a standard set of macroeco-nomic policies and sectoral interventions of a technical nature. They requirefundamental transformations in society, which are invariably driven by do-mestic politics and local actors. The MDGs have been distorted and mis-construed as objectives that can be reached through technical interventionsfunded by foreign aid to scale up investments and replicate lessons learntelsewhere. The controversy regarding poverty trends in Africa — whetherthe region will meet the poverty target by 2015 or not — exemplifies thedanger that global target setting can lead to policy-based evidence mak-ing. It is unhelpful to set targets for dimensions of human well-being thatare not clearly specified, lack a solid metric or for which no robust dataexist.

An equity-neutral and hands-off pursuit of the global targets denies the factthat all targets have two key aspects: rate and pattern of progress. The mainreason why the MDGs will not be reached at the global level is becausethe pattern of progress has been inequitable in the majority of countries.Progress has not been inclusive. The inequitable pattern is slowing down therate at which the world is making progress. Behind each preventable childdeath, behind each out-of-school child, behind each malnourished child,behind each maternal death, behind each AIDS patient who is not treatedwith antiretroviral medicine and behind each instance of environmentaldestruction lies a story of high inequality and deep-seated discrimination. Inother words, poverty will be eradicated not by more aid or more growth butby greater equality.

Equity-adjusted statistics on human development are a practical way ofexposing the fact that most of the progress in the majority of countries hasbypassed the most disadvantaged segments in society. They involve differen-tial weights for the different quintiles so as to expose the inequitable patternof progress.16 Differential weighing, however, is often criticized as discrim-inating towards the non-poor because it implies attaching greater value to alife saved at the bottom than at the top. Such reactions are understandablebecause they stem from the firm belief that growth and progress automat-ically trickle down to the poor. The fixed mindset is not ready to considerthe possibility that the growth paradigm may merely benefit the elite, whileimpoverishing the disadvantaged and victimizing the dispossessed. It is notthe purpose of equity-adjusted statistics to discriminate against the non-poor;they simply aim to expose the degree to which progress has been inequitable.

16. Vandemoortele and Delamonica (2010) explore various methods to adjust standard statisticsfor inequality, using U5MR data for sixty-three countries.


Equity-adjusted statistics give an indication of the progress achieved and thepattern followed. The latter is missing from standard statistics.

The one-sentence summary of the latest MDG data (UN, 2010b) is thatapproximately 40 per cent of the road has been covered but it has taken 70 percent of the time. Thus, some 60 per cent had to be covered in the remaining30 per cent of the time. Are the MDGs still feasible? Several analysts havealready given their verdict. They argue that without accelerated growth,more aid to Africa and better governance, the MDGs will indeed be missedby a large margin. It is not yet common currency to argue that the worldstill has the potential to achieve the MDGs, provided the growing disparitieswithin countries are tackled in earnest. This would require a major changein the prevailing development paradigm, which is never easy. However, ifthe course is to be changed, the discourse about the MDGs will have tochange too. A little equity and bit more policy space at the country level canyield spectacular outcomes in terms of human well-being. Until then, thereal meaning of the MDGs will remain ‘Minding Development Gaps’.

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Jan Vandemoortele served with various parts of the United Nations forthirty years. His last assignment was as UN Resident and HumanitarianCoordinator to Pakistan. As Director of the Poverty Group at UNDP, hewas closely involved with the creation of the Millennium DevelopmentGoals. He holds a PhD in Development Economics. He now works asan independent researcher, writer and lecturer, and can be contacted at:[email protected]. His recent publications include ‘MakingSense of the MDGs’ (Development, 2008); ‘The MDG Conundrum: Meet-ing the Targets without Missing the Point’ (Development Policy Review,2009); and ‘Taking the MDGs Beyond 2015: Hasten Slowly’ (with E. De-lamonica, IDS Bulletin, 2010).

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